January 2018 US diplomatic cables warned of coronavirus leaking from Wuhan lab
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
That’s how I feel. Isn’t it just the darndest coincidence that the worldwide deadly pandemic just happened to originate in the backyard of the only BL-4 research center in China. And they just happened to work with bats, and somehow two years earlier someone bothered to warn US govt. about safety issues there.
It also interesting to observe the level of coverup here. That page about the visit was scrubbed, doctors silenced, etc.
How many vendors at the wet market, the alleged source of the virus, even sold bats or made bat soup and such? How does it compare with other wet market around the country or the world?
I imagine Iowa State University does some research into diseases afflicting corn. But if some new corn fungus shows up in Iowa, it’s probably because corn covers half the state, not because the lab is located there.
Geneticists have already explained that the virus is perfectly natural: all the genes are similar to preciously-seen viruses, and genetic engineering leaves tell-tale signatures of the methods. That would seem to diminish any possible role of the lab to just being the place of transmission, something that could have happened just as easily outside the lab, where an expanding human population is in daily contact with the wildlife they’re encroaching on.
That “wet market” theory is indeed far from certain. Bats aren’t eaten as often as people seem to think, and they are usually not eaten raw.
What’s far more likely is simply someone coming in contact with bat shit. Bats like caves, and human dwelling often are even better. They live really close to humans and there is ample opportunity for contamination.
I live in the middle of Berlin, and I have bats catching mosquitos right outside my window in the summer. If bats can make a living here, with climate on the cold side and every building being tightly isolated and passing every inspection German bureaucrats have come up with, imagine how much they enjoy the somewhat wilder structures of a quickly growing city.
It deserves mention that it’s no coincidence these cables happen to be leaked now. It’s an administration trying to deflect blame. Yet they fail to do even that properly: these cables only raise the possibility of this lab being involved in any way. But what they prove definitely is that there was ample warning in time.
And what difference would it make? Short of an intentional release (which only the most deluded conspiracy nuts believe), it’s negligence at best. That doesn’t change the fact that the federal government ignored dozens of warnings and wasted eight to twelve weeks.
9/11 was very obviously intentional, and the national security establishment still got raked over the coals for it. Imagine 9/11, but with ten similar attacks in other countries starting in late May, Interpol declaring it a “world-wide threat”, and a bunch of small terrorist attacks in Washington State at the end of July.
Now that China has disappeared people who were speaking out, shut down the Shanghai lab that originally published the virus’ genome, and is back to tightly controlling information out of the country, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure if this pandemic was a preventable accident. Either way it is a major black eye for China.
(I'm not saying this to argue that the lab escape theory is wrong, just to argue that Reddit posts are difficult to appraise.)
That's some diabolical research.
To put it in DnD terms: The researchers have high intelligence, low wisdom, and probably low dexterity.
Here is China making a coronavirus like the one causing the pandemic, even acting on the ACE2 receptor and testing it in human cells, publishing it in early 2008: https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899
Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711
This one gene-edits the host cells to have both human and bat traits, making it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-010-0729-6
There are more. The ASM's virology journal published more of generally the same kind of stuff. I can't find the link right now.
Seems like not enough lessons were learned from SARS. How many pandemics are going to come from this reservoir before the world gets fed up with the mismanagement of it?
After the USA banned this research because of the danger, some of it moved out of the country. At least one of the researchers moved from the USA to Wuhan, China. The ban should have been a clear message: such research is unacceptably dangerous.
They didn't. This virus was unknown when it first showed up in patients. The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is 96% similar, which translates to a decade or so of evolution.
> US scientists that twice visited the lab.
Do the cables say that "scientists" voiced concerns? I thought they were diplomats. The Wuhan Institute of Virology works closely with US, French and Australian national labs. A lot of the Wuhan personnel is trained at those foreign labs. The lab has lots of scientific collaborators in the US, and receives grant money from the NIH.
Everything I've been able to find about the lab in Wuhan indicates that it operates at the same stringent technical level as foreign BSL-4 labs, and that there's a lot of exchange with foreign scientists.
First, the article is title "State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronavirus." Immediately sensationalizing the title to imply this coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab is not good.
Did the coronavirus leak from the Wuhan lab? Maybe, there's some evidence to suggest it's a possibility, but jumping on conspiracy theories, or unproven claims (e.g. "it was the wet market" -- it may have been, but many of the original infectees were not involved with the wet market) is just spreading fake news. Haven't we had more than enough of that over the last few years?
That's not at all what the original title was, matter of fact not even what the original article was about.
Doctors knew about this back in November-December timeframe, maybe even earlier, and were asking people with cough and chest pains if they had been to Wuhan recently.
How many people could have had the information to confirm that in November/December?